Raspberry Pi Is Running Well On Wayland/Weston

[Serge]

Once such chips are available, I'm sure you will see it.
For now, IFC6410, quad krait.

This rpi stuff is boring as hell. Cheap sure, but in this case, you really do only get what you pay for, which was obsolete even before they came up with the idea. It would be far more interesting if they actually updated the hardware to keep at least consistently far behind the "current standards".

If your objective is running a graphical desktop, rpi is useless. About its only use is in automation/remote control.

That doesn't sound boring at all! Graphical desktops, I think, are far more boring than the kind of things that people have been using the RPi for.

I think an educational tool is useless if it can't be used to teach people how to make practical things. The RPi's success is due to the fact that it, in fact, can be used in practical, useful projects.

[plonoma]

Does anyone know if it's possible to at the same time have the Raspberry Pi output to the HDMI and RCA video two different images, screens?

If not would the improvements in wayland and recent improvements in hardware accelerated compositing allow for such things on the Raspberri Pi?

[TheOne]

The Pi driver doesn't support KMS, so instead of modifying it they instead modified the Wayland backend to hook into the existing driver.

You could modify either one to get things working.

In this case, they decided to go ahead and do the backend so they could expose more hardware specific capabilities directly into Wayland, to increase performance. That was a specific choice they made, and one that a lot of embedded manufacturers are likely to agree with. Such things are rather common in that space - you can't even run the same ARM linux kernel on multiple devices until very recently, because everything is very SOC-specific.

If anything has a Mesa driver, though, it likely won't need any extra work because it will probably already have KMS and other necessary driver features. That's the more generic way of getting things to work.

mmm that seems one of the purposes of canonical using the CLA, so if hardware vendors implement their own backend they aren't forced to release the code, but I guess that wayland being MIT licensed should permit the same

Well at the end I was just curious of how backends are implemented on wayland , statically or dynamically like drivers do. I was thinking on the stupid scenario (that may never happen) where you have a PC based on a SOC and the wayland backend was developed specifically for it. Now if that SOC got damaged and you have the OS installed on some external drive, you would just buy a new SOC, but that new SOC uses another wayland backend. Would wayland would automatically detect which backend is compatible for current used hardware like the drivers system does?

[smitty3268]

Would wayland would automatically detect which backend is compatible for current used hardware like the drivers system does?

I'm not entirely sure how it works, although it appears wayland builds a separate .la file for the pi backend code.

There has to be some kind of detection system, though. It's worth noting there were already multiple backends available before the Pi. For example, there is the standard KMS/DRM one that plugs into the Mesa drivers, and there's also a pixman based software rendering version.

[torsionbar28]

I would love to see a single-board computer with ARMv8 and 64-bit.

^^ This, x1000.

An ATX or Micro ATX form factor commodity board, with 64 bit ARM v8, would be absolutely perfect for a low-power-consumption home server. I'd drop my old Opteron machines in a heartbeat for some ARM v8 commodity boards.

[torsionbar28]

Funny how people still think that 2 Ghz Quad-Core ARMs are fast. Even 64-Bit ARMs won't be fast. The fastest ARMs get owned by a Pentium III 700 Mhz. I'm not joking.

For a home server, that's perfect. That's plenty of HP for a home web server, or email server, or media server. And the TDP would be far far less than any Opteron or Xeon (even the low-power models). Not to mention the cost would be much less.

[droidhacker]

Funny how people still think that 2 Ghz Quad-Core ARMs are fast. Even 64-Bit ARMs won't be fast. The fastest ARMs get owned by a Pentium III 700 Mhz. I'm not joking.

Wayland compositors depend on KMS specifically. Just Weston happens to do that.

Fast is a relative term.
There is fast, compared to doing things by hand with a pencil.
There is fast, compared to market averages.
There is fast, compared to what will be in the future.

Without a point of reference, you can't invoke the term "fast" to begin with.

Although I do appreciate you providing a point of reference, being a crapium700. Yes, in fact, a quad arm WILL obliterate a crapium700. On a core-by-core basis, perhaps not obliterate, but certainly will hold its own. But also remember that those ancient intel chips were only SINGLE CORE.

That crapium700 will also suck down enough electricity to kill an elephant.


As about the only reference I can come up with that compares some dissimilar architectures;

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1270596

No, I couldn't find a benchmark of a p3-700

There are three runs of nbench, on a droidx 1GHz, a P4 3GHz, and an i7 3.4GHz

The first benchmark in there is the droidx, which is a SINGLE CORE A8.
The second benchmark in there is a DUAL CORE P4 3GHz, which appears to only be a *few* times faster than the single A8. In fact, judging by those numbers, I would expect a SINGLE CORE P3 700 MHz to ride in VERY VERY CLOSE to that SINGLE CORE A8.

And just for fun, I ran the same benchmark on my own phone, which is a dual-core kraitv2 1.5GHz. Compared to that same dual-core P4-3000, my little krait won more than it lost. Very interesting, considering that my phone runs at... HALF THE FREQUENCY. To put that in simple language that you would understand... it completely and absolutely wipes the floor with that crappy old p3 that you suggest would run circles around a modern ARM.


Summary: Go get some real numbers before you start spewing nonsense out on the interwebz.

Also... you'd probably be right about the p3-700 running circles around... an rpi. rpi is a weakass piece of... poop.

[droidhacker]

That doesn't sound boring at all! Graphical desktops, I think, are far more boring than the kind of things that people have been using the RPi for.

I think an educational tool is useless if it can't be used to teach people how to make practical things. The RPi's success is due to the fact that it, in fact, can be used in practical, useful projects.

... I've suggested automation. What about that do you not understand?
Also, with all the bogus "developments" they're working on, THEY are clearly focusing on graphical desktops.

[droidhacker]

^^ This, x1000.

An ATX or Micro ATX form factor commodity board, with 64 bit ARM v8, would be absolutely perfect for a low-power-consumption home server. I'd drop my old Opteron machines in a heartbeat for some ARM v8 commodity boards.

64 bit is cute, but not so significantly greater performers than a good armv7. As I've suggested already, you CAN DO THIS NOW, with an armv7 that is practically as strong as an armv8. IFC6410 is a standard pico-ITX form mainboard with a quad-core krait.

Its even got an SATA header on the board.

[c117152]

Also... you'd probably be right about the p3-700 running circles around... an rpi. rpi is a weakass piece of... poop.

The RasPi's hardware is fast enough. The lack is in the software. First there's the closed GPU drivers that won't let you composite properly or playback video with gstreamer. And then, there's the unoptimised JavaScript interpreters.

If you have a unit, put on the newest Raspbian or even RiscOS and try out netsurf. I find it preforms exceptionally well as long as video and JavaScript aren't involved.
There's also a few free FPSs in Raspbian available that are running circles around anything that p3 could handle.

It's actually a very good demonstration of just how bad JavaScript really is...